Thursday, August 23, 2012

I feel like I just came out the other side of a sandstorm of school fundraisers, and birthday parties, and writing assignments, and my own crippling sinus infection, which probably qualified for medical research but not blog material. Though, to be honest, for the last four days, a lot of my free time has gone into Greg Heffley and his repeated diaries about life as a Wimpy Kid.

My son asked if he could start reading these books last week. Apparently they're all the rage amongst the literate third grade crowd. I had my suspicions that anything that popular with little boys probably contained messages that are contradictory to some of the actual good parenting I've attempted, so I told him we'd read them together.

I was right. The main character/narrator promotes laziness and selfishness and general dishonesty. But, the fans are right too - he's hilarious. I don't exactly have to force myself to read them. I still can't keep up with my son though, who is currently holding two very nice librarians hostage until they deliver into his hands the fifth book in the series. They promised him they'd call as soon as they got a copy returned or transferred into our library branch, but he wouldn't budge from in front of their desk, so I just left him there to wait it out.

We've discussed a couple of scenes in each of the books that I decided to use as examples of what not to do, but I pretty much gave a broad warning of, "If you start acting like Greg, you'll stop reading about him." And, fortunately, the mom in the books, Susan, does some decent parenting of her own and tries to instill some values into her sons and the readers.

And I'm willing to talk through the bad to benefit from the good. Because my son has never been this excited about reading. He's never been this excited about anything other than sports and dessert. If a sarcastic, scheming, sullen middle-schooler is what it takes to spark his interest in books, so be it. Now I just need to find a series to bridge the gap between this elaborate cartoon and C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia series.

Since Brainy is tracked out right now, we practiced some of the laziness this wimpy kid preaches and watched the first two movies on Tuesday. Which, as always, aren't as good as the books. But my son's reward for getting through four full weeks of nightly football practice (and tackling a lot of teammates to the ground) is that I'm taking him and a friend to see the third movie at the theater tomorrow. If I can get him to abandon his post at the library that is.

Monday, August 13, 2012

This
is sort of embarrassing to say as a “writer”, but I didn’t own a laptop until
last week. I know most people over the
age of twelve have one already, but I’m slow to warm up to advancements in technology. I try new flavors of M&Ms the minute they
hit the shelves, but that’s because I’m comfortable with chocolate. Computers, phones, and Blu-Ray players baffle
me.

I
have to take this opportunity to mention that we owned a Blu-Ray player for
almost six months before I realized it.
I was actually at a Redbox renting a movie for the kids and I said, “Oh,
they only have this one on Blu-Ray. We’ll
have to pick something else out.” Brainy
looked at me sympathetically (because I’m mentally handicapped and he’s kind)
and said, “Mom, we have one of those.
The white Sony player downstairs.”
Oh.

Anyway,
my career is looking more promising, so my husband bought me an Ultrabook. I would tell you that’s another word for a
laptop, but I’d get in trouble.

I’ve
been really busy lately, so it wasn’t until today that I had a chance to take
it for a spin. (Just kidding, honey, I
handled it more carefully than I did our children as newborns.) And, well, things didn’t go so smoothly. I had the whole thing locked up inside of
twenty minutes and I was probably crying out of frustration after ten.

First
of all, I’m not very adept at avoiding an invisible mouse that’s playing possum
underneath my wrists. And I’m just
typing along, crafting beautiful prose and whatnot and then the bottom falls
out and suddenly my fonts change, or my margins, or I’m knee deep in a find and
replace edit that I never even started!
Sometimes my paragraphs would go rogue and set themselves up like poetry
stanzas. For every three words I typed,
I was hitting the undo button or backspace ten times.

And
it isn’t just the mouse that’s sensitive.
The keys are too. I was trying to
think of the appropriate adjective for a thought I was trying to convey, and I
left my fingers hovering over the keys for a moment while I looked up and
pondered. When I conjured the word I was
looking for and returned to my document, there was half a page of Ls. And don’t even think about breathing too hard
near the caps lock button. Or CapsLk as
he goes by in Ultra circles.

So,
I got this great gift and I can’t use it.
Not effectively. Once The Voice
of Reason unlocked my keyboard, I started typing this blog. That was four score and a fortnight ago. I’m hoping practice will make possible –
perfect being too far of a reach at this point.
I had a similar learning curve with my smart phone when I got it for
Christmas. I still don’t take advantage
of most of its features, but I’ve learned to use the ones I need, like checking
the weather and quicktexts and getting gmail updates.

The
plan was to use this contraption to blog, do my writing assignments, and create
amazing works of fiction on the go. You
know, like writing the next New York Times bestseller on the sidelines of
football practice or in carpool, obvious places for great ideas and
inspiration. But none of that is going to
be possible if I don’t conquer this mouse pad.

My
mother-in-law was asking me tonight if there was something she could get me for
my birthday to go along with my new Ultrabook.Why yes, some patience and an IT specialist to travel around with would
be lovely.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

There
are storage facilities everywhere and I’ve always wondered why there’s such a
big demand for them. Are there really
that many people with homeless possessions?
Isn’t it just a way to pay rent without actually using your things? Doesn’t that mean that you don’t really need those things?

Storage facilities were a mystery to me because I’ve never needed one. But based on the
prevalence of them, I assumed I was one of the few people who don’t.

Well,
mystery solved. Almost. I still don’t know how so many of them end up
abandoned and on A&E’s Storage Wars,
where odd people come in and bid on the units at auction with only a glimpse and a
guess from the outside. (I’ve never
actually watched Storage Wars, but I
have friends that watch it and have told me more than I ever cared to know about
it, so I’m semi-qualified to mention it in this blog. Clearly I’m also “semi-qualified” to choose
friends.)

But
at least now I know why a normal person would need to rent one of those. My brother, who is arguably the most normal
person in my family, invested in not one, but two storage units because he’s
moving. He put his house on the market
and it sold in the first week, sooner than expected, too soon to move into his
new home. This stroke of luck (who sells
their house after one showing these days?) left him with three months of
homelessness that he’s decided to wait out in an apartment. An apartment that can’t even come close to
holding all of their things.

So,
The Voice of Reason and I spent two sunny and muscle-testing days helping him
move, store, and arrange. And I got my
first experience with self-storage. It’s
a different game than Storage Wars,
where someone wants to get everything out of a unit. Our game was how to fit as much as possible
into one. Well, two.

It
reminded me of my true calling as a structural engineer. Because for a girl who has always loved to
pack a trunk like I’m assembling a puzzle, this was like the world
championships of that event. Standing
with one foot on the back of a sofa and the other atop a bookcase, I was able
to drop rolls of Christmas wrapping paper into a cylindrical slot between
workout equipment and a high chair, winning me the gold medal in acrobatics and mental acuity.

But
all the while, I was wondering why a guy who has never wrapped a Christmas
present in his life had so many rolls of Christmas paper. I used to earn extra Christmas presents from
him by wrapping all of his to other people.

I had one of
those he-doesn’t-need-me-anymore moments because I realized that his wife wraps
their Christmas presents now. But then
I figured out how to thread his weed eater between the two kayaks and it reminded both of us
that I’m still useful.

And
that’s good. Because if there’s one
place you don’t want to find out you’re expendable, it’s a storage
facility. Someone could knock you off
and toss your body into one of those units and it probably wouldn’t ever be
discovered. Unless those Storage Wars weirdos show up and bid on
the leather recliner and mahogany table they see from outside and then get
burned not only by too much wrapping paper, but also a dead person. Because who needs more of those?

So,
storage facilities exist for in-between stages of life and homicides, mystery
solved.